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Flat Earth Rommulans deny existence of Moon’s tidal effects

Over at Joe Romm’s blog ‘TP’, they’ve been working themselves up into a froth over Tropical Storm Sandy. So I offered some wisdom to pour oil on troubled waters counter their drivel. It was a pretty innocuous comment I thought, but it has been censored anyway. Here are the before and after screenshots.

Must be that Joe doesn’t like the idea that the Moon’s spring tide was more of a factor than sea level rise in the Sandy flooding. Right on cue, Anthony Watts has just posted an article about JPL finally admitting the satellite altimetry data ain’t very good:

Cracking post Anthony. John Daly was saying this 16 years ago. The error range was +/- 75mm at best. That’s twice the sea level rise since 1993. Signal lost in noise indeed. I don’t see how this new gizmo is going to recover those data though. Changes in orbits due to solar wind variation etc are not steady or regular in magnitude.

There is also the human factor:
“In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’”
-Nils -Axel Morner-https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/sea-level-scare-stories-simply-scandalous/

I hope JPL will be telling us a lot more about their methodology than the article reveals so far. Well done for flagging up this important measurement issue.

No worries about this one making it through moderation, WUWT is open for debate.

When we were talking to Prof Julian Dowdswell at the Scott Polar Research Institute a few weeks ago, Roger, we talked about altimetry, if you remember, and I asked whether the data were compared to anything “real”. I was quite surprised to hear the answer was no. So the data is just compared to itself and over time and that involves subjective “interpretation” as far as I can see. Hence the recent halving of the supposed ice-mass loss in Antarctica revealed by the Grace satellites when someone obviously “changed their mind”!

Let’s hope this new system is not just a more sophisticated means of attempting to hoodwink us. Or perhaps, as instanced by the “no more on-shore wind farms” announcement, and the Japanese Nuclear power stations deal just announced, the worm is finally starting to turn and we may be seeing the beginning of the end of this gigantic AGW scam. I do hope so!

How odd. Tidal range at Manhattan, NYC, Battery Park is something like 5 feet. Sandy (a.k.a. Frankenstorm) brought a storm surge of some 13 feet there (more than 2 feet over the subway system’s safety limit). On the other hand, the Norfolk and Long Island hurricane of 1821, which struck at low tide “produced a storm surge of 13 feet in only one hour at Battery Park”, remarkably close.

Had it come at high tide, like Sandy, just imagine what a 18 feet high rise could have done to the city.

I assume it isn’t matter of global warming but how the North Atlantic accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is dissipated during the hurricane season. Current total ACE number is 121 (just above normal) of which Sandy 12.5 (Nadine =25), from which one could conclude that global warming may not be the main contributing factor. (WUWT, Climate etc.)